


an open grave; a furrow

by falseknightontheroad



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Inspired by Hades and Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), M/M, i have never had the greatest luck with multi-chapter works but will do my best to actually update, if you think that's boring that's fair and it's not the only thing this'll be inspired by, tags ratings etc to be updated as the story progresses, weird comparative-mythology bullshit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:27:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23446240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falseknightontheroad/pseuds/falseknightontheroad
Summary: The story is well-known. They are Life and Death, or Summer and Winter, or the Green God and the Grave God, or the god of the shoots straining upwards to sunlight and the god of the twisting and interior depths of mine and cavern.Once, it was even as simple as those names would appear to make them, at first glance.This is the story of what made it complicated.In media vita, morte sumus; in media morte, vita sumus.
Relationships: Germany/North Italy (Hetalia)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	1. the maiden rich in fruits

**Author's Note:**

> [Content warning in this chapter for...thematic dubcon, I guess, since it is a take-off of Hades and Persephone.]
> 
> [Ed.: Moving the end-notes up here because otherwise they apparently get shoved to the end of the _whole work_ for some reason, gah.
> 
> Obviously enough, Romano is Demeter, Veneziano is Persephone, and Germany is Hades. Spain is Hermes. For those who may not know, Demeter = grain, agriculture, and fertility, Persephone = plant life in general, springtime in particular, and fertility, as well as a whole lot of queen-of-the-underworld chthonic attributes, Hades = the dead (not death itself, that’s Thanatos), the underworld, and things that are deep underground such as mineral wealth, Hermes = messengers, travelers, debate, boundary-minding, trickery, and cattle rustling.
> 
> This is sort of a tester chapter, posted because I crave sweet validation. Upcoming chapters will thematically involve a lot less of Greek mythology and a lot more more of Terry Pratchett's _Wintersmith_ , _Gawain and the Green Knight_ , me waving around the _ubi sunt motif_ in Old English poetry, me waving around the _consolatio_ genre of Old and Middle English writing, me trying somehow to work _Pearl_ into this, me staring in consternation at a big pile of intensely Christianizing primary sources about what death is (and what life in the midst of it, and vice versa, means), and me in general doing a lot of things that are not, technically speaking, in my wheelhouse, because I’m Medieval _Studies_ , not Medieval Literature. And me procrastinating on fulfilling my MA requirements. Can’t forget that 😬.
> 
> I’d like to say, quickly, that general reception of the Hades & Persephone myth tends to ignore something that I’ve also necessarily had to ignore in this retelling because of the genders of the characters involved, which is that the myth as represented in ancient writings was very deeply connected with the dynamics of marriage in ancient Greece and the way that that impacted mother-daughter relationships. Once a young woman—at least, an aristocratic one—married, she was expected to cut herself off from her family of origin; it’s not for nothing that the Thesmophoria, one of the most widespread ancient Greek festivals which celebrated Persephone’s descent and return, was women-only and may have been the only time of the year some of those women, including mothers and daughters, were able to socialize with each other. People who ignore that also often tend to treat Demeter in a very disrespectful way, IMO.
> 
> On a much different note, I’d also like to say that, were I doing an, I guess, lighter-hearted version of the above story, the pomegranate seeds would definitely be explicitly replaced with a potato, because Romano’s absolute fury at his little brother not only being dumb (*in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, it’s made fairly explicit that Hades tricks or forces Persephone into eating, in this hypothetical retelling, that probably wouldn’t be the case) enough to eat underworld food, but to be tempted into doing the, like, ONE thing you shouldn’t do in the underworld by a fucking tuber would be a sight to see.]

The story is well-known. They are Life and Death, or Summer and Winter, or the Green God and the Grave God, or the god of the shoots straining upwards to sunlight and the god of the twisting and interior depths of mine and cavern.

Once, it was even as simple as those names would appear to make them, at first glance.

This is the story of what made it complicated.

> In spring you rejoice in the meadow breezes  
> and you show your holy figure in shoots and green fruits.  
> You were made a kidnapper’s bride in the fall,  
> and you alone are life and death to toiling mortals…
> 
> (“Hymn to Persephone,” unknown author, composed between 200 BCE and 100 CE; trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis, _The Orphic Hymns: Text, Translation and Notes_ )

Here is a story. Believe it if you will.

> Once, when the world was new and the first people still stumbled through it like newborn foals, there were two brothers, and they were gods. They still are; you cannot stop being one once you start. And these two gods had somehow become a little turned around in their dominions, so that the elder brother (a man whose foul temper concealed a steady heart) was the god of agriculture and cultivation, although the plow did not precede the grain. To him fell orchard and vineyard, field and garden, paddy and terrace, and he took great pride and joy in teaching the people all that could be known of them, and by his hand their crops were caused to grow.
> 
> The younger brother, for all that he was younger, was the god of all that grew wild—he cared little for even the most delicate and light-handed of cultivation, and rejoiced in the unplanned, in the windfall fruits and weeds of the ditch as much as the strongest and noblest of the trees that were born with him. He would run and play, lie in the grass, roll down hills, overcome with delight at every living and growing thing scattered to their own plan across the wide earth, upon which the sun poured its honeyed light.
> 
> And then one day a third god—the god of the vast and lightless realms of the dead, far beneath the living soil—saw this younger brother, and was enamored of him, and desired to possess for himself his joy and vitality. And this third god, convincing himself that he acted to keep the other safe, tore his way upward through the earth, and seized upon the younger brother and dragged him, despite his pleas, into that cold and terrible cavern where nothing grew, and there made a captive of him: a treasured and cosseted captive, but captive nonetheless.
> 
> The elder brother, frantic over the younger’s absence, was finally told of what happened by one of his brother’s friends. He went in outcry to the rest of the gods, who could—or would—do little and less to aid him, for what went on in the realms of the dead was the business of that realm’s lord and him alone. And so the elder brother roamed the world, wailing his fury and grief, searching endlessly for some way down to where his brother was held, and he refused his duties and ignored the pleas of the people, subsumed in his own terrible loss and knowing, too, that his dereliction could not long be ignored.
> 
> It was not. Without the elder brother, the fields fell barren, the orchards withered, the paddies rotted. Terrible rains came that rotted the hooves of the kine in pasture, and droughts that blew away the once-fertile earth to the far corners of the world, and snows that choked the people inside their meager dwellings. And all the people cried out to their gods, Where have you gone? Why have we been so abandoned? And all the gods turned to the elder brother.
> 
> The elder brother said, I will not help. I will sit here, with my hair shorn and ashes on my face and my clothes all in rags, and I will not help, for my younger brother has been stolen and the thief is known to us all and you do not act to help me. Do you think it pleases me to do this? Return to me my brother, and I will set the plantings right. He would not be shaken, not for all the honors the other gods promised him, for they did fear the lord of the lightless and endless cavern, of the secrets buried deep beneath the stone, and ill wished to enter his domain and demand the younger brother’s return. But all the more they ill wished for the world to die, and themselves lose the worship of the people.
> 
> So it was agreed that one god—a sometime friend of the brothers, light of foot and word and hand and heart, would be sent, and hopefully with his swift-running tongue persuade the lord of the dead to give up his ill-got prize.
> 
> That god won his way to the hall of the lord of the dead—a story in its own right—and cried aloud, O most gracious host, O wealthy one! It is decided—all the gods have held council, and decided—that you must return your captive! For his brother misses him greatly, and, unshakable in his fury and grief, would starve the world and deprive every god of the honor due them, yourself included, O receiver of many. You know best of all that the dead do not make sacrifice. It is decreed: you must return your captive.
> 
> And the god of the dead turned to the younger brother and said: As it is decreed, it will be. Yet if you remain here, by my side, you will receive as my consort honor beyond all imagining.
> 
> And the younger brother said: Yet if I go, I will see my brother, and the sun.
> 
> All three of them turned, then, towards the surface, and set out along the pathways known to the gods. When they reached the surface, the younger brother wept to see the ruin that had been made of it by his elder brother’s rage, and wept more to see his elder brother. And wept, perhaps, a little to be parted from the god of the dead, for he had come during his captivity, in some small way, to love him. Upon their reunion, in a single gesture, the elder brother caused the harvest to be sent up from the ground, and the earth to grow once again fruitful, and the rains to come in their proper places and times, and he held his younger brother to him and wept to see him as well.
> 
> Then the elder said to the younger: Brother, you feel strange to me, there is something odd within you.
> 
> And the younger brother said: I do not know what you mean.
> 
> The elder said: Tell me this, brother: did you eat the food of the lord of the dead?
> 
> The younger said: I did, yes—I was hungry, and I had thought—only a little, only a little—and I was so hungry—have I done wrong?
> 
> The elder brother wheeled as a lion upon the lord of the lightless cavern, and shouted, You tricked my brother! You vile and heartless thing, lord of rot and nothingness, you tricked him, you forced him to eat your cursed food!
> 
> The god of the dead said, I neither tricked him nor forced him. He ate of his own accord.
> 
> But he did not know, roared the elder brother, that all food in the realms of the dead is cursed so that all who eat of it must remain there forever!
> 
> The god of the dead said again, He ate of his own accord. He could well have refused, as gods do not die of hunger. Certain facts may have been assumed to be common knowledge. Yet he did eat.
> 
> And I will feed you your own entrails, spat the elder brother, and then the guileless god of the swift tongue stepped between the two of them.
> 
> That god of the door-hinge and the cattle-raid said: But, how much of the food did he eat?
> 
> The younger brother spoke: Only a little, only a very little—really, it was almost nothing—and I was so hungry, and it smelled so good, and I hadn’t known…
> 
> If it was only a little, said the god of the swift tongue, then forever may be excessive, may it not? Surely even you, O wealthy and unyielding one, think it hard to be shut up forever for a few mouthfuls?
> 
> The god of the dead, having seen the younger brother’s joy at regaining the surface, and having spent many an hour hearing him bemoan its loss, said: Yes. Yet the law is the law.
> 
> The elder brother spat at him.
> 
> So why, then, said the guileless god, must he be so imprisoned? For a little mouthful, why not a little time—a third of each year, perhaps. For the law is the law, but what are we if not lawgivers? He may spend a third of the year with you, and the rest to do just as he pleases. And I hope that the first thing he pleases to do is to come with his elder brother to visit me, for I have missed both of them sorely.
> 
> The elder brother realized, with spite in his heart, that he was unlikely to find any better solution. The younger brother knew that four months was far better than forever, and better too than his former indefinite captivity, and that the lord of the realms of the dead held only the greatest respect and reverence for the laws he was placed under.
> 
> And so ever since, for four months out of the year the god of the wild vegetation and the riot of growth descends into the domain of the lord of the lightless caverns, the receiver of many, and there sits as his consort, while above his elder brother, the god of hoe and plow and spade, in remembrance of his great dolor and his still-burning anger, sends the crops underground, to await his brother’s return.

That is a story, believe it if you will. Here is another, and another.

> The god of the wild vegetation was not dragged down, but instead fell, out of his own carelessness, into one of the pits over which the people would make their sacrifices to the god of the dead.
> 
> He did not fall, but jumped, out of curiosity—longing to know where the roots of his plants ended.
> 
> He jumped, but because he wished to meet the god of the dead.
> 
> He and the god of the dead had been meeting and talking long before—at cave-mouths, mostly—and the god of the green and growing had held out his hand for the god of the lightless caverns to take and walked with him into that vast and secretive world.
> 
> The god of the dead forced him to eat his food.
> 
> The god of the wild vegetation knew what the food would do, and ate it anyway.
> 
> He ate none of the food.
> 
> He ate more than a little of the food.
> 
> None of it happened—it was a convenient way for some people to explain their planting and harvesting cycle and aspects of their marriage rite in one story. 
> 
> All of it happened. 
> 
> All of it is happening still.
> 
> All of it is happening still, and none of it happened like this.


	2. come nevir yit May so fresche and grene

> Come nevir yit May so fresche and grene  
> Bot Januar come als wod and kene;  
> Wes nevir sic drowth bot anis come rane:  
> All erdly joy returnis in pane.
> 
> Came never yet May so fresh and green  
> But January came again, wild and keen;  
> There was never drought but that once again came rain:  
> All earthly joy returns to pain.
> 
> (“All Earthly joy returns to pain,” William Dunbar, 1450-1530?)

They always existed—in the sense that parts of the planet were sometimes hot, and then cold, and then hot again; in the sense that things grew and decayed. That is true: that they were always present insofar as the conditions they represented could exist.

It is also true that neither of them, nor their kin, existed until much later. Until humans, faced with the _facts_ of the world, attempted to express its _truth_ , which is a much more nebulous concept; watching the hours of daylight wax and wane through the year—considering things in _hours_ and _years_ —and appending a why to the what. Until they were seen, named, propitiated.

The year turns in its circle, a wheel driving forward.

> Summer is a young man with gold in his eyes, and plants grow where he walks. Everything in his bearing speaks of heat and the heavy heads of ripening grain. There he is, in _The Age of Fable_ , and there is Winter, tall and grim and austere, granite scoured by ice, both illustrated in a fairly decent imitation of John R. Neill. This particular printing is relatively uncommon, and its few editions have become, in some circles, collectors’ items, and have been dragged into the periphery of one or two overeager graduate students’ dissertations on gender in art at the turn of the century—for Winter and Summer to both be men, _young_ men at that, in the illustration accompanying the fable of their unending dance—and in a children’s book, no less!—is catnip for a footnote or an aside.
> 
> The story is quite simple: Summer and Winter dance, or rather, they are danced, in and out. At each equinox, the dance is held on earth, and Summer and Winter meet in it, turn, pass, turn again, leap between the human dancers, and the one fades back and the other is welcomed in, and in this way we ensure that everything proceeds as it should (the “we” being the narrator’s diegetic audience, who are implied, following as this story does in _The Age of Fable_ after that of the Holly King and Oak King, to be vaguely Celtic and millennia dead.)
> 
> (This story is as true as that of the Holly King and Oak King and their ceaseless battle, which is to say: not at all, and also entirely.)
> 
> (Whether or not the diegetic audience ever heard anything like these stories, or danced anything like these dances, is immaterial.)

You couldn’t ever say that it began when their eyes met across the lines of the dance. They didn’t have what you could call eyes, when it began. And, as well, it had begun in other places, too, where they weren’t danced, where they had different names.

But there was a time when they had got eyes, and those eyes did meet across the dance, and that’s as good a starting point as any.

The spring dance, spectators laughing and clapping along. The dancers have had all winter, shut up indoors in smoky halls, to practice, and muscle memory pulls many of them through the leaps and turns and reels, as does the promise that afterwards they can all get falling-down drunk. The blackthorn has bloomed; white blossom drifts over the ground in a mockery of snow. The soil steams beneath the sun. One could imagine that the earth itself is turning over and groaning, a sleeper long in the waking.

Summer hops and twirls through the dance, in the spaces where the dancers aren’t, breaks to slip through the crowd and leave a little more of the knowledge of his arrival in his wake, rejoins a reel along the sides. Mirror reel, this time around—eye to your partner, make sure you’re in step. So he does.

Winter returns his gaze. He has shed his thick, fur-lined cloak; he moves through the dance stiffly but with a light-footedness that belies his size and bearing. Summer smiles at him, Winter’s lips thin as he nods his head back.

For the human dancers: right hands across and left hands back, the music straining towards its conclusion. Summer and Winter, the odd couple out, are left facing each other across the set. Face unmoving, Winter offers Summer his hand. Summer notes that he has also shed his gloves, and that his hands are broad and pale and thick-knuckled.

Summer takes Winter’s hand, takes both of them, begins the turn. Winter, feet solidly planted, sets the pace, far too stately for Summer’s personal preference. Then again, Summer thinks, it’s only fair for Winter to decide how fast he wants to go, in the spring. He smells sharp and clean and though the day is warm and the dance is long his hands in Summer’s are chill.

> “The time came when the people were accustomed to play their music and dance and sing in order to see Winter out and Summer in, but the flute that they needed was nowhere to be found, for Fox had run away with it! Fox said to himself, ‘Now _I_ have the flute, and now I can play the music to call Winter or Summer just as I please!’
> 
> “Fox played the flute and capered for all he was worth, but he was just one creature alone, and there was not enough room for Summer and Winter to dance between him. Winter remained in the land, and his chill breath made the sun watery and weak, and the earth slowly fell waste and frozen. People shivered in their huts, and birds in their nests, and animals in their burrows, and still Fox played the flute, convinced in his pride that he could call the seasons.
> 
> “The other animals, Wolf and Deer and Otter and Boar among them, all gathered together to devise a plan to take back the flute from Fox and return it to the people…”

They keep turning, the unseen pivot in the center of the dance. Summer gives Winter’s hands a quick squeeze in preparation to let go, and in that second of contact feels—

—small, warm things breathing beneath the snow, beneath the earth, the thick, close smell of leaf mold, seeds waiting to sprout, itching at the insides of their shells. Potentiality. Blood bright and red on the snow. _Recognition_ —

—and the flare of it in Winter’s eyes as well.

He has something of mine, Summer thinks. He has something of mine, and I think I’d like it back. And the dance is ending, ending, and Summer spins and whirls up to the head of the set while Winter retreats to the foot. Their eyes meet once more, and Winter raises a hand in sign of parting, and leaves in a hiss of white snow that blows into blackthorn petals.

Summer sets his garland upon his head, while around him the onlookers whoop and the dancers wipe the sweat from their foreheads, and sets about the business of _being_.

> “The Oak King asked, ‘Who are you, and what do you mean to do in my woods?’ and the strange stag, antlers all hung with swags of holly, replied, ‘I am the Holly King, and these are _my_ woods, to do in as I wish. Begone with you, old one!’ But the Oak King was well proud, and scraped the ground with his hooves and lowered his antlers all sprouting with leaves, offering battle.
> 
> “They joined, and the clash of their antlers was terrible as thunder, and they battled round the clearing until night fell. Both were mighty, but the Holly King was young where the Oak King was old and failing, and finally the Holly King drove his antlers home and the Oak King fell, bleeding from a dozen wounds. The Holly King bugled his triumph from the hill, and turned to rule the woods as he wished—as a place of dark, and cold, and quiet.”

They meet again, after the harvest. This is the other dance—the one without spectators, or without spectators that the dancers can see. Except two of them.

Winter weaves his way up one side of the set, tracking Summer with his eyes. Summer, who has discarded the garland of blossom and wheat. The pipe hoots and skirls, indistinguishable for a moment from the wind. Winter thinks back to their last dance, to the moment when he had held Summer’s hands and thought _blood_ -warm, not sun-warm, smelled copper and loamy decay.

> _sƿaþes middan geard_  
>  _ealra dogra gehƿam dreoseð_ _⁊fealleþ_
> 
> The great earth itself  
> Falls and decays each day

I have something of his, Winter thinks, and I think he has something of mine as well.

In other places, they toss the Sun from hand to hand like a ball. In other places, Winter kills Summer, to be killed again in his turn. In other places, Summer retreats to a cave of his own accord, or Winter shuts him up in one, to emerge when the wheel has spun.

In this place, Winter extends his hands, submits to the terribly undignified whirling-about that Summer favors (it is, after all, autumn and only fair), and ascends to the head of the set. He places his crown of ice upon his brow. Summer waves, and shouts “See you soon!” all in good cheer. The season of the wolf has set in—but, thinks Winter, summer is when there is battle, summer is when the wolves feed.

 _See you soon_. But Winter thinks that, even after Summer has vanished in a rustle of grass that turns to the rattle of bare branches, he is seeing Summer, is always seeing him, even now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is largely just self-indulgent faffing around, but _I’m_ having fun, and that’s what matters.
> 
> Notes: _The Age of Fable_ is technically the title of part of Bulfinch’s _Mythology_. John R. Neill is most famous for his illustrations of many of the Oz books. This chapter is drawing pretty heavily from _Wintersmith_ (and, to a lesser extent, _Small Gods_ ) by Terry Pratchett. ( _Wintersmith_ , as well as the other books in the Tiffany Aching series, is some absolutely bangin’ YA for any, uh, I’d say 10-and-up kids you may happen to know.)
> 
> The story of the Holly King and the Oak King is, to be somewhat unkind, an Ancient Celtic Legend™ that was made up out of whole cloth in the late ‘40s by Robert Graves after he got really, really high on _The Golden Bough_ and Jungian theory and wrote _The White Goddess_. You can tell because nobody who insists that it’s a real ancient legend can ever say which Celts it’s from, and it is also frankly pretty easy to spot when someone’s been huffing Frazer and Jung because they start getting reeeeally on-the-nose with their mythologizing. Anyway, the story is that the Oak King rules the “light” half of the year and the Holly King the “dark”, and every solstice (or equinox) they fight for supremacy and swap places. It gets used a lot in Wicca (I grew up in a Unitarian Universalist congregation with a big Wiccan contingent, and the Holly King and Oak King story would get trotted out at every winter solstice party). We’re going to pretend that this nonexistent early-1900s children’s mythology book is from an alternate timeline where someone came up with them earlier.
> 
> Right/left hands across is a figure in Scottish country dance, also known as the star or wheel.
> 
> The Old English poem quoted near the end is “The Wanderer,” one of the more famous poems in the Exeter Book—you may know a little of it from _The Lord of the Rings_ , where the “Where now the horse and the rider? Where the horn that was blowing?” bit is basically a paraphrase and expansion of lines 92-6 ( _hƿær cƿom mearg / hƿær cƿom mago / … / huseo þrag geƿat / genap under niht helm / sƿa heo no ƿære_ , Where now the mare? Where now the warrior?… They and their time have gone under the dark helm of night, as if they had never been…). I’m using Christopher Patton’s translation from his _Curious Masonry_ , since it’s what I have to hand. On the letters used—I’m following Patton’s transcription of the text, which attempts to hew as closely to the Exeter Book as possible. ƿ is ‘w’, þ and ð are both ‘th’ (there’s some debate over whether þ is a voiced ‘th’ like in ‘thick’ while ð is an unvoiced ‘th’ like in ‘that’, largely because that distinction is made in modern Icelandic and because there are some words where only þ or only ð are ever used, but scribally they seem to have been fairly interchangeable otherwise?), and ⁊ is a scribal abbreviation for ‘and’ (in this case ‘ond’).


End file.
